Lee Grant Quotes

You don’t need a love scene to show love.

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.

What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. It’s just remarkable.

This is our lives. The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there’s a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

My instinct was that it was Sidney’s childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.